Maxine Kumin: Poet, Gardener, and Warrior of the Earth
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
June 6, 1925
Dearest garden reader,
On this day, the world was graced by the birth of Maxine Kumin, an American poet, novelist, children’s author, and devoted gardener whose Pulitzer Prize-winning voice found profound inspiration in the earth beneath her feet.
Maxine’s poems and prose often celebrate the garden in all its wild, imperfect beauty, echoing both joy and struggle in the dance with nature.
She once wrote in her poem History Lesson:
“That a man may be free of his ghosts he must return to them like a garden.
He must put his hands in the sweet rot uprooting the turnips, washing them tying them into bundles and shouldering the whole load to market.”
Few gardeners will fail to recognize the truth in these words—the way tending the soil unearths not only turnips but memories, fears, and growth. These are hands and hearts intertwined with toil and redemption.
In a more humorous and fierce turn, Maxine’s poem Woodchucks explores the dark comedy of an uneasy truce between gardener and pest:
“Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange was featured as merciful, quick at the bone and the case we had against them was airtight, both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone, but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range...”
This battle between woman and woodchuck reveals the sometimes unexpected violence lying beneath everyday gardening struggles, and Maxine’s candid reflection exposes the contradictions of a “lapsed pacifist” caught in the war with nature’s intruders.
Have you ever felt this duality, torn between love for your garden and fury at its devourers?
Her spirit of resilience shone most brightly after a near-fatal accident in 1998, when her horse bolted during a carriage-driving clinic.
Defying odds and doctors’ expectations, Maxine survived and chronicled her recovery in Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery.
She writes:
“Keeping the garden going becomes for the family a way of keeping me going.
Every morning Judith climbs the hill above the farmhouse to where my fenced garden is situated...
Everything here is grown organically...
It has taken years to achieve this orderly oasis, which somehow compensates for my disorderly desk drawers and the chaos of my closet.”
Maxine’s journey from a suburban garden of petunias and dandelions to a sprawling farm of wild asparagus, rhubarb, garlic chives, and Jerusalem artichokes is a testament to growing not just plants but spirit and gratitude.
Her love for gardens impossible to tame, and her vow, “I plan to spend the rest of my life on my knees” in praise of all plants, even purslane and poke, reminds us that gardening is a sacred act.
Maxine Kumin passed away in 2014 at the age of 88, leaving behind a verdant legacy of words and deeds.
May her poems and example inspire every gardener to embrace the earth with hands and heart alike.
Discover more about Maxine’s work here: (books available by this author) and Inside the Halo and Beyond.
